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Best of the Net Nominations

Annually, Split This Rock nominates 6 poems in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database that have been published through the Poem of the Week Series for The Best of the Net Anthology. The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing. Issues of the anthology, which highlight the work of the previous year, appear at the end of every January and are available for free online.

Explore Split This Rock's recent Best of the Net Nominations below, and please join us in celebrating these incredible and necessary poems by reading, listening, and sharing. All poems are free and available as text and audio in The Quarry.

2025 Best of the Net Nominees

These six poems reflect, renounce, and reveal—

In her poem "Alias," Chrysanthemum notes, “Preferred implies / suggestion, when convenient. Preference is neither // mandate nor promise.”
In Ghinwa Jawhari's "the butcher," she writes of a Palestinian man who “once built a small home on his own land before it was / flattened, stolen.”
In "How to make salabat," Kay Ulanday Barrett speaks about “How in three languages, / I don’t have words for absence. A mouth becomes thud.”
In their poem "Love Machine," KB Brookins declares, “All this time I thought we needed permission / to dance. Flap our imaginary wings.”
In "Torricelli" by Kyle Carrero Lopez, a senator vows to “plunder / that island see torn asunder that island.”
The speaker in Sacha Marvin Hodges’ poem "billie holiday, handcuffed to her deathbed" asserts, “I go nowhere the wind has already been.”

These poets represent a range of lived experiences. Their intersecting identities include being Black, Arab American, Asian American, Latinx, multi-racial, disabled, transgender, gender nonconforming, queer, gay, and working class.

All 6 poems and over 600 more are available for free as audio and text at The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Help us share the poems widely in celebration of the poets' timely, skillful, and evocative work!

2024 Best of the Net Nominees

These six poems engage in praise, examination, and envisioning. Golden writes, “Eyes open: I see every planet ————————–[breathing] / with [pomegranates] ——————in their–———[future].” Kay Ulanday Barrett notes, “When / statistics splay, when the masks are forgotten, there'll be / more of us we'll have to teach.” Moncho Alvarado asks, “is the fire confused when it eats? // & told her, I'm going by she & my real name.” Nancy Huang speaks of “The one who built enough rooms / in her spaceship for everyone // to fit.” Porsha Olayiwola states, “salt-water / has a perfect memory, so be it all of us are / trying to get back to where we came from.” In TC Tolbert’s poem, “The mirror / only returns parts of what holds you to yourself, no matter / the angle, and in this way it is just like language.”

These poets represent a range of lived experiences. Their intersecting identities include being Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latine, white, multi-racial, disabled, transgender, gender nonconforming, genderqueer, pansexual, lesbian, queer, and working class.

To access the full poems as both audio and text in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, please follow the links on the poem titles below: